So, we’re actually trapped on The Mountain in Crestline, California. Never had THAT on my Bingo card. Right now, I can hear helicopters flying overhead—delivering supplies, I imagine, since actually getting into town by normal means is somewhat difficult at the moment. This isn’t normal weather for our climate up here in the San Bernardino Mountains, here in SoCal. We usually get maybe a foot or two of snow total all winter. Otherwise, it’s just chilly and we’ll get some rain and that’s it.
Governor Newsom has actually declared a state of emergency for the county of San Bernardino and other counties that had been hit by these winter storms. I dunno what’s going on in the other counties, but this is my personal experience of being snowbound in my little house in the mountains in San Bernardino in Crestline. Newsom even sent the State National Guard out here—that’s the helicopters I’ve been hearing all day, setting up their supplies and equipment, I figure. I won’t be seeing much of that, I’m sure, since me and my bunch are currently not in need of anything other than maybe a couple of strong backs to help us shovel. LOL
The snowplows we have can’t deal with the levels of snow we got over the last week. The stuff is just too deep. Oh, they’re getting through it, it’s just taking time. They went through and plowed what they could, at first, ran out of fuel, the gas pumps closed (they actually ran out of gas), and had to return to their stations. They need tracked vehicles to deal with this and we don’t have any. We don’t have the infrastructure to handle the kind of snow we got this week. We got as much snow in five days as we usually get in three years. At least the next week is going to be clear and mostly sunny so we’ll hopefully have a bit of time to dig out and clear the streets.
But, for now, we’re closed off.
We’re just one of the “early” towns on the strip of little villages that run along Highway 18 that this series of storms hit like a hammer. We’re one of the first of the towns (the other is Waterman Canyon) and we got roughly seven and half feet of snow in five days. I don’t know what the towns further up The Hill (as we call it, here) have gotten. I’ve heard reports of up to ten feet in Big Bear. All roads in and out are closed and will likely be so until around March 10th. Chains and four wheel drive are inadequate to the task of driving in this stuff and people are asked to stay in their homes if they’re still up on the mountain. The road out front of our place is still unplowed because they just can’t get to us right now. We need tracked vehicles with bulldozers, not your usual style of snow-plows. Folks are literally trapped up here. People who normally commute to work from the mountain towns are worried about losing their jobs because of missed shifts.
Some homes have been without power for days and some folks are running out of food. That’s pretty scary. Us, we’re fine. We had a couple of short power outages, but the juice came back on after a short while. So we’re good, there. We knew the storms were coming ‘cuz my wife keeps an eye on the weather, so we made a food-run beforehand and we’re stocked up. We’re just buried under seven feet of snow that we’re slowly digging out from under.
We had to shovel off our back deck a couple of times to make sure it didn’t collapse from the weight. When the two big bomb-cyclones came through in 2020 on Thanksgiving and Christmas, we weren’t at home and couldn’t deal with the mass of snow, so we lost the back railing and all the furniture that was on the deck to an avalanche of snow that slid off of our solar panels. We lost our carport (that’s the frame you see in the photo—it’s a new one: we had to rebuild it—we took the cover off because wind that came with the rainstorms the month before shredded it) out front to the weight, too, plus, a neighbour’s tree fell into our house and punched a head-sized hole into my wife’s office wall. We still haven’t had the money to fix most of that (it’s going to cost us close to 10K just to repair the deck), other than a temporary patch on the hole in the wall.
This year, we stayed on top of it and kept the back decks shoveled as well as we could to keep the weight of the snow from ripping it off the freakin’ house.
Other places haven’t fared as well: we lost our only grocery store that’s been a staple to the town and surrounding villages since 1946. They tried to save the roof, but the weight of all that snow on a 20K sqft roof (a guesstimate based on info from their website that said the combined sq ft of their old Oak Trunk store—now defunct, which may re-open temporarily to serve the town while the grocery is rebuilt—and the Post Office was over 40K sq ft) finally took out the whole thing and it collapsed, crushing everything underneath it. The owners managed to salvage some of the food, I think, but I don’t know how much. And they had just gotten a food delivery that night, too. Fuck.
One of things I’ll miss is the big aquarium they had by the meat counter with native fish of the San Bernardino Mountains that was a feature of the store. Those poor fish are probably gone, now. I’m sure they didn’t survive.
We also lost Ace Hardware to a partial roof collapse—well, one of them—it’s a split location situated across the street from each other, and it was one of those that went. I think it was the one on the same side as the Post Office, but I haven’t confirmed which portion of the two locations, yet. I can’t seem to find any info on it. One’s their main hardware store, and the other is their garden and lumber centre—that one has a peaked roof and probably wouldn’t fall, so I’m guessing it was the other one on the Post Office side. From what little I can find out, it was only a partial collapse, unlike the total destruction of the Goodwin’s Market. But, it’s still sad that places in our little village are coming down because of this. Linder’s tire shop in the area we call Top Town had part of their roof cave in, too, but I can’t find any news on that. Two other buildings since I’ve started putting this together have had their roofs fall in, as well: a little shop called the Akasha Healing Centre which had actually been empty for a while (the place had gone out of business) and the yacht club beside the local doctor’s office (yeah, the religious nutter I fired for not giving me birth control because of his dumb extremist religious views).
Two homes literally exploded, fire-fighters aren’t sure how. Speculation is that the snow covered some sort of gas vent and when the owners tried to heat their buildings, they just… popped. No injuries, that I’ve heard about, though, so that’s good. Sad for the people who lost their homes. Hopefully, insurance will cover the damages. Luckily, we don’t have to worry about that—our place went fully electric a few years ago—no gas line to our house. We had all of that turned off some time ago.
Anyways, we’re safe, for now, slowly digging our way out, repairing our shovels as they break—they can’t handle the mass of the snow we have. We have quite a few shovels for different kinds of snow and ice, but frankly, they all seem inadequate to the task. This stuff is insane. We’re taking it in shifts over the next couple of days so we don’t burn ourselves out too much. I have asthma and a heart-condition, so I have to be especially careful when I take on a task like this. There’s three of us and hopefully, we don’t hurt ourselves trying to get all of this stuff off of our decks so we can maybe leave, eventually! We will run out of food sometime, after all.
But, roads are getting plowed out, from web-cam feeds that I’ve seen and reports on the local forums I’ve read through, so things are slowly getting back to normal. Ta, for now from a legit disaster area, such as it is. Nah, this is more of a mini-adventure than anything else. An inconvenience, really.
Compared to the ongoing tragedy in Turkiye and Syria, I don’t think we hold a candle. We just have snow and we’re stuck in place. They have over 50K dead, and a 100K missing. Them I weep for. Honestly, if anyone can see a way to donate to relief efforts to help the folks out there, please do. I can fix my house, eventually. So many there don’t even have a house left, or even a family, so many are missing or just… gone.